conservative

I was watching a video where the host was asked whether he thought voting should be mandatory.

He was split on the issue, and argued a bit from both perspectives. On one hand he thought that since we have mandatory jury duty, it makes sense that we could have mandatory voting. He also argued it might be better for the country, since in polling, America (and you could likely argue the same in many Western countries) the country leans Left, which means the Liberal party would be far more likely to win.

On the other hand, he didn’t much like the idea that people would be forced to vote.

I’m pretty firmly in the camp against mandatory voting. In fact, I think mandatory jury duty is awful as well, and it isn’t a good excuse to force people to do more.

Anyhow, I made a video about it that goes a little bit more in depth. It also includes the original hosts points.

The combined wealth of the richest 1 percent will overtake that of the other 99 percent of people next year unless the current trend of rising inequality is checked, Oxfam warned today ahead of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

So basically, instead of having a minimum wage, you would have a maximum wage. Either this would mean that people weren’t allowed to make over a certain number depending on their profession or (and I like this option better) depending on how much the highest paid person of that company makes, the lowest worker would be guaranteed a certain amount.

So for example (and these are hypothetical numbers) the CEO of company A makes $500,000 per year. This might mean that the lowest paid position in that company is guaranteed to make 10% of that amount, which would work out to $50,000 per year.

As wages for the highest paid positions go up, so to does the wages of the lowest paid positions.

The arguments I’ve heard against this position (or ones I could imagine) are that by capping wages, you take away the incentive to achieve more. This would especially be true in the first scenario that features a hard cap on wages, but the second scenario of scaling wages would still allow for wage increases but would simply mean that those wage increases would be across the board.

You could also argue that it will take a lot of bureaucracy to figure out a fair percentage between the highest paid positions and the lowest, but I don’t think that’s a great argument because it could be done given enough political will.

The most convincing argument against a maximum wage or scaled wage system is that it will chase companies away. They won’t want to operate within a system that doesn’t allow them to take advantage of…errr…increase their pay without also raising the pay of their employees.

Personally, I can see why that might raise concerns.

So what are your thoughts? Do you think either of these two ideas have merit or do you believe the way things run now is working better than either of these ever could?

Hell, I’m no economist. I’m surprised I’m even typing this because money and math both bore the shit out of me.

At one point, the victim was threatened with a knife and told to curse President-elect Donald Trump.

“Say f— Donald Trump,” someone is heard saying.

“F— Donald Trump,” the victim says.

And:

The suspects, three of whom are Chicago residents, are expected to be charged in the next 24 hours, Cmdr. Duffin said. Police will determine whether kidnapping or hate crime charges will be given to the suspects, who he described as “young adults.” They have all given video statements.

When I first heard this story on social media last night, I tried finding it on major news networks because I thought it might be a hoax. There have been several fake hate crimes reported since the election of Donald Trump, but this one seems to be the real thing.

Last night I was able to find a story on CBS but other mainstream news channels have begun to report on it this morning.

I think it should definitely be classified as a hate crime. It was racially and politically motivated and they have video evidence of the attackers yelling racial and political slurs.

The reason why I’ve written so much about ideologies lately on this blog is because of identity politics and how dangerous I believe it to be. I think this is another direct result of that.

We put people into racial and gender categories instead of treating them like individuals and then we teach some of those categories that other groups are oppressing them. We even teach people that some groups are incapable of being racist, when that (power + prejudice = racism) clearly isn’t true.

I think these types of events will continue to escalate as long as we go down the insidious path of identity politics.

I just published a new video addressing a comment I received as well as the larger issue of group-think. I hope you’ll give it a watch, and if you do and enjoy it, I hope you’ll consider giving it a thumbs up on YouTube.

The decision to remove “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain and “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee came after a parent filed a complaint, WAVY reported. The parent cited excessive racial slurs as the reason for wanting the books banned, Superintendent Warren Holland told the news station.

The parent, whose son is biracial, said that her concerns are “not even just a black and white thing.”

“I keep hearing, ‘This is a classic, This is a classic,’ … I understand this is a literature classic. But at some point, I feel that children will not — or do not — truly get the classic part — the literature part, which I’m not disputing,” she said at a Nov. 15 school board meeting. “This is great literature. But there (are so many) racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.”

The parent said her son, who was reading “Huckleberry Finn” for a high school assignment, couldn’t get past a certain page in that story on which the N-word appeared seven times.

A racial slur appears 219 times in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and 48 times in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by (any) means,” the parent said, also noting psychological effects language has on children. “There is other literature they can use.”

It is important to note that some Accomack residents were not in favor of the ban, saying such a policy presents a dangerous slippery slope when it comes to literature in education.

“I don’t want to see it happen because if you start with one racial word in a book and have to go on and on and on and pretty soon you’ll be burning books left and right,” R. Kellam told WAVY.

And another parent, Catherine Glaser, who has children who will go through the Virginia school system, said, “Everybody’s read it. … It didn’t change a difference in my views at all. I’d like my son to read those books. … My daughter’s mixed, and I don’t have a problem with it. I love those books.”

So where do you come out on this debate? Should the books be banned or do you think they should remain a part of the school curriculum?

Personally, I’m against censorship, and I agree with most of what the video commentator said above. I think this is a slippery slope and once you start banning books for one thing, that sets a precedent to keep doing it for other books people might consider offensive.

In my opinion, this is another case of insane PC’ism striking again.

If you agree, why? If not, feel free to make your case in the comment section.

Since the election, I’ve tried to find out what the Alt-Right is. It’s so frustrating because everyone seems to have a different definition. Some people say that it’s a movement of people from the Right who are outside of the mainstream. Others that it’s a white supremacist movement, and others that they’re pranksters who just enjoy making memes and trolling the Left.

I did run across two videos that seem to do a good job of trying to explain what the Alt-Right is and how it became a movement.

The first of the videos (follow the link if you want to watch it) says that the Alt-Right has four tiers. Those Tiers run from Western Nationalism to an outright White Supremacist movement.

It’s an interesting video so I hope you’ll watch it.

The second video talked about Milo and Steve Bannon as well as how the Alt-Right formed and became an influential political factor. I found this video very interesting as well.

In that video, the creator claims that Milo and Bannon aren’t part of the Alt-Right but that they’ve tried to shape the movement into something they can use. He thinks that effort is doomed to failure, because at its core, the Alt-Right is deeply racist.

He also believes that the extreme Left acts as a mirror and the two groups amplify each other, and that while the extreme Left uses words such as ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ to silence dissent, the Alt-Right uses the word ‘degenerate’ to do the same thing.

Anyhow, I hope you’ll give the video a watch and let me know what you think. What is the Alt-Right? How did they become a political force? Do you think they’re a real phenomenon or a conspiracy theory made up by the paranoid media and its pundits?

Here’s another example of stupid PC outrage. I think the host of this show is spot on with his criticism, and at the end he says if this keeps up, you can look forward to eight long years of Trump.

I have to agree, and I could find stories like this every day. The Left is just becoming moronic with it’s faux outrage and PC nonsense. It reminds me of when the Religious Right used to act outraged because Christmas was supposedly under attack or something else equally stupid.